Gangster State

After Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s death, Magashule visited the
mother of slain struggle activist Stompie Seipei, who also hailed from
Tumahole. The event received a fair amount of media coverage, and
Magashule spoke about his involvement with Madikizela-Mandela
during the late 1980 s.
Dennis Bloem took umbrage at Magashule’s claims. ‘Yesterday I
listened ... while he [Magashule] sat with Stompie Seipei’s mother,
telling the nation how he took more than 100 young comrades out of
the country for military training with Mama Winnie,’ an angry Bloem
said in a statement. ‘He knows that he did not do this, only Mama
Winnie did.’^3
According to one of Magashule’s former associates from the time of
their ‘internal exile’ in Hillbrow, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
‘Our unit in Johannesburg did assist people to get out of the country,
and Winnie did help us to get people out, but it wasn’t anywhere near a
hundred people,’ said this source. ‘I can only think of about twenty
people that we helped to get out.’
In an apparent attempt to latch on to the renewed popularity of
Madikizela-Mandela in the days after her death, Magashule used his
visit with Seipei’s mother to reiterate a widely circulated view that
Madikizela-Mandela had not been responsible for Seipei’s death in the
late 1980 s, and that the apartheid government’s security and
intelligence apparatus had instead fabricated her involvement as part of
a smear campaign. In doing so, he made claims about his activities
during the struggle that appear to be untrue.
‘We knew [she did not kill Seipei], because we had been working with
Mama Winnie, we have been there all the time,’ Magashule told
journalists. ‘We all ran away from the Free State and we were there, we